“Google Drive is a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff,” a post by Sundar Pichai to the Official Google Blog notes. “Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.”

Google is offering 5 GB of storage for free—compared to 7 GB at SkyDrive—and has paid storage tiers of 25 GB ($30 per year), 100 GB ($60 per year), and even 1 TB ($600 per year). Google’s pricing is per month, but I did the math to more easily compare to SkyDrive, which comes with an annual fee, and an additional 20 GB of storage will set you back $10 a year, compared to $25 for 50 GB and $50 for 100 GB. Long story short, Google is more expensive but offers way more storage.

Anywhere/Anytime access to your content. Google says your content is “just there,” and accessible on the web, or by using a new Drive app on a Mac or PC, Android device, or, coming soon, iPhone and iPad.

Integrated search. As you’d expect from Google, its online cloud storage service offers deep search capabilities, including being able to read the text in scanned documents using OCR.

Discuss this Article 5

Cool! The company that reads all of my emails, tracks my browsing against my explicitly chosen settings, and "accidentally" breaks into my wifi with their street view car is now offering to hold onto all my files for me...what could possibly go wrong :-)
Objectively, though, very nicely covered and presented, Paul. Thank you for taking the time to fill us in on this!

Well presented, but really let's think about this... what does it really offer that isn't entirely trumped by SkyDrive? Oh, I got this... Google offers a 1TB storage option. I have to expect Microsoft to throw in an "ultimate" 1TB storage option by the time Windows 8 launches... or at least a 500GB for $250 option.

Neowin.net has an article regarding exactly that Mark:
http://www.neowin.net/news/comparing-skydrive-and-google-drives-privacy-...
While they don't own your docs, Google intend to give them a good read through. We all remember how clippy used to ask "It looks like your typing a letter", maybe Google will ad a pop-up, "It looks like you're interested in these adverts...".
I'll stick with SkyDrive.

I signed up for the 25 GB offer and bought additional 100 GB to back up all my personal photos. The service works really nicely and I think Microsoft set up very competitive pricing, but many people will still probably flock to Google in spite of that and some very strange privacy policy. I guess next step for Microsoft would be to merge SkyDrive and LiveMesh.